Metaphysics and Philosophy
List of Articles
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Metaphysics: The Third Way
The modern distinction between secular philosophy and confessional theology, consistent with the contemporary episteme, tends to impose a restrictive alternative between two forms of metaphysics. Yet these are by no means mutually exclusive: any genuine metaphysics, insofar as it seeks the intelligibility of the whole, cannot be confined within the limits of discursive reason alone.
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Feminism, Otherwise
Can we conceive a feminism that is neither ideological nor merely reactive? An unexpected reading! In just a few pages, we encounter a rediscovered feminism—from ecofeminism to Plato, from Virginia Woolf to Simone Weil—culminating in a renewed understanding of the feminine as a power of truth. This is precisely the book’s wager: from the lived body in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the figure of Diotima in Plato, it seeks to uncover a metaphysics of the feminine that has largely gone unnoticed.
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Meeting with Jean Grondin: The Beauty of Metaphysics
In this interview, Jean Grondin reflects on the enduring presence of metaphysics despite modern critiques and proposes its refoundation from both historical and conceptual perspectives. Drawing on its Greek sources—Plato and Aristotle—he highlights its fundamental role as a search for meaning, beauty, and first principles. The dialogue also explores its contemporary developments, particularly through hermeneutics, as well as its relationship to theology, spiritual traditions, and the challenges of the modern world. What emerges is a conception of metaphysics as an open and inexhaustible dialogue on the meaning of things and… The beauty of metaphysics.
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Meeting with Bruno Bérard: Metaphysics for Everyone
This interview offers a critical assessment of the contemporary status of metaphysics, characterized by its institutional dispersion and its frequent reduction to historical or analytical expressions. Against this dilution, Bruno Bérard reasserts its principial scope by grounding it in three converging indices: the requirement of a first cause, the irreducibility of meaning to discursive rationality alone, and the persistence of revealed contents within spiritual traditions. Metaphysics is thereby restored to its status as first philosophy, oriented toward a supra-rational intelligence of reality that exceeds the limits of modern ontology and epistemology.
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Meeting with Jean-Paul Coujou, “Metaphysics as Ontopolitics.”
This article proposes a rereading of the history of metaphysics based on its constitutive articulation with the political. By bringing to light a common origin between the discourse on being and that of being-in-common, Jean-Paul Coujou develops an “ontopolitical” perspective aimed at overcoming their modern separation. Metaphysics thus appears as inseparable from the historical, juridical, and communal conditions of human existence, opening toward a political ontology in which theory and practice, being and community, tend to converge within a single intelligibility of the real.
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Meeting with Guillaume Lurson. “Refounding a Philosophy of the Soul”
Trained early in metaphysical reflection, Lurson found in the great abstract questions—being, freedom, the soul—a privileged access to the foundations of human problems. Influenced first by Kant, then nourished by Plato and Plotinus, he long experienced the tension between the desire for the absolute and its limits. His doctoral work on Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900) led him to rethink metaphysics beyond the separation between ontology and theology, seeking mediations that reconnect being and Spirit. He defends a form of spiritualism according to which Spirit permeates all levels of reality and manifests itself in diverse modalities. Fidelity to Spirit, unity of being and thought, and the resolution of moral and aesthetic questions form the core of his book on Ravaisson. Finally, he outlines the project of a contemporary refoundation of the philosophy of the soul, open to alterity and to the contributions of the human sciences.
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Meeting with Camille Chamois. “Are other worlds possible?”
What first awakened your interest in metaphysics? I became interested in this question in the mid-2000s (so rather late), when I was confronted with what then appeared to me as a paradox. On the one hand, I discovered that there was indeed a very active contemporary metaphysical scene (contrary to what the Heideggerian or Derridean […]
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Meeting with Laurent Cournarie: Metaphysics—or the Nostalgic Essence of Philosophy
It would certainly be excellent news to learn that metaphysics is not dead. But one may doubt its proclaimed rebirths as much as its endlessly repeated deaths. This doubt may well be the rather “deflationary” standpoint we personally adopt with regard to metaphysics. Being a metaphysician, doing metaphysics The little we have published on metaphysics—both […]
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Esotericism, Metaphysics and Gnosis: Some Elements
If esotericism is a veil, allowing us to know that there is something behind the veil, metaphysics, in the transparency of intelligence, is a revelation. However, these two approaches are only paths; gnosis cannot be attained by one’s own efforts, it is never anything other than a given.
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Philosophy… why live with it?
A hundred pages to enter into a life of philosophy, a journey through life. The adventure that every child discovers by naming things, the adventure that every adult pursues to a greater or lesser extent. It is because human beings are philosophers by nature, as Mr. Jourdain talked in prose (Molière, Le bourgeois gentilhomme/The Bourgeois Gentleman or The Would-Be Gentleman). They are even metaphysicians, said Schopenhauer. It is not surprising that this is confirmed in young people with severe disabilities. An experience that benefits us all. Bruno Bérard.
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Let’s not be semi-clever!
Pascal explicitly criticizes this common figure of the “semi-skilled,” undoubtedly inspired by Montaigne. Bourdieu, for his part, refers to “half-learned people.” What is important here is the idea that ignorance is both the starting point and the end point of the path to knowledge—which invites a posture of humility. Beyond this philosophical perspective, Pascal also hints at a dimension that could be described as Gnostic.
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One body for two
The concrete physical experience of motherhood (“one body for two”) allows us to relegate philosophical questions about gender to their rightful place, to talk about the female body without gender connotations, and to think about this place of origin for all of us, through pregnancy, as a “being-with” that precedes and makes possible the separate being that will be born. By reporting on this sociologically and philosophically, the philosopher—a woman and mother of three children—touches on this metaphysics of relationship, a necessary complement to the interminable metaphysics of being, and the ethical implications are huge.